


Light of the Grave

by Sororising



Series: NatSharon week 2016 [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, NatSharon Week 2016, Origin Story, Pre-Slash, Some angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-10
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2018-08-30 04:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8517730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sororising/pseuds/Sororising
Summary: Sharon waits at the gate of the graveyard. The air feels haunted, even at the entrance, weighted down by a heavy stillness that she knows isn’t supernatural but which makes her shiver with something more than cold anyway.Each grave casts a shadow. They fall across the winter snow in rows of soft grey. Like the tombs of ghosts. Natasha is dressed all in black. In mourning. The only colour to be seen is the vivid red of her hair. Like fire, Sharon thinks. A single flame, surrounded by ice.She moves forward.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I promised myself I was going to upload stuff for NatSharon week on time! I should not have believed me. Although, only 3 days late with the first one, which honestly is kind of impressive for me. 
> 
> This fic spans about a decade, and is (I hope/in theory) a potentially realistic, canon-compliant origins story for how Natasha and Sharon might have met, got to know each other, and finally fallen in love. Aka my first enemies-to-friends-to-lovers fic, yay.
> 
> Thanks very much to [spooky-redwing,](www.spooky-redwing.tumblr.com) who I believe was the creator of NatSharon week, I loved this prompt and found it really interesting to write.
> 
> Title from the hymn 'Immaculate Mary,' for reasons which will become clear whenever I upload my day 7 work (I can guarantee that will not be day 7, oops).

* * *

2007.

Sharon looks at Coulson. She knows with absolute certainty that he’s about to say something annoying. She likes the guy just fine, but she often doesn’t understand him. His code of ethics seems to align with SHIELD’s values right up to some indefinable point, and then he’ll say something that makes her feel like he’s playing a whole different game to the rest of them.

Of course, she frequently gets that feeling around Fury as well, so clearly SHIELD doesn’t have an issue with people making up their own rules when it suits them.

“Barton wants to bring the Black Widow in alive,” Coulson says, and Sharon looks at him even more closely.

She feels like there’s something more hiding underneath that sentence - well, of course there is; she doubts Coulson has ever said anything in a straightforward way when there’s another option available. But the point is, she feels like there’s something _relevant_ being hidden this time, and that’s the part that irritates her. She can’t do her job with half a picture. 

Or, she can. But not as well as she could if people would just share their fucking intel with her. She’s only a junior agent, sure, but she wants to make her mark as soon as possible, and that means standing up against decisions that she _knows_ aren’t going to do anything but harm.

Peggy tries to insist that Sharon doesn’t have anything to prove, but they both know that isn’t even close to the truth. 

Besides. Margaret Carter sure had a lot to prove back when she’d co-founded SHIELD, so. And one of the many lessons Peggy taught her is that you should never follow blindly.

She forces herself to focus.

If they can manage to bring the Widow in alive, that would be nothing but a coup for them. The information she could give them - not that she _would,_ necessarily, but at least if she was alive the possibility would be there - might solve a few of the trickiest problems they’re dealing with at the moment, as well as potentially saving a lot of lives. It seems like a very reasonable call for Barton to have made.

Which means there’s something Coulson isn’t saying.

She keeps her gaze on him, knowing he’ll get the message, hoping he’ll choose to respond to it. He doesn’t have to, of course; he outranks her here in every way possible. But she’s known him - and everyone at SHIELD, really - for a long time, and maybe that will count for something.

He smiles, just a little, which immediately makes Sharon even more alarmed than she had been. “He wants her to be an agent,” he says, somehow making the most ridiculous statement Sharon’s ever heard sound like a perfectly normal request.

What the _hell._

“No,” Sharon says, without needing to think it through for a moment. “She’s coercing him. Or tricking him somehow.”

“Highly likely,” Coulson says, in that mild tone that always makes Sharon want to punch him. Just a little. Not enough to really _hurt,_ of course. 

She finds it hard, sometimes, to reconcile this man with the one who had sent her birthday cards with funny little puns in them every year of her childhood.

“What does Hill say about it?” Sharon decides to ask. She could start pointing out the numerous flaws in whatever scheme Barton thinks he’s come up with, but she'd prefer to do this the easy way. And having someone on her side in this would be nice.

“Oh, she has a few reservations,” Coulson says vaguely, which she translates as _she thinks it’s a batshit idea that’s going to get good people killed._

That’s one person on the side of sanity, at least.

“And Fury?” Sharon asks, closing her eyes for a second when Coulson smiles again.

“Fury? Oh, he’s all for it.”

Bloody _hell._

Right. She may have lost this particular battle - she ignores the little voice inside her head telling her it was lost from the moment this conversation started, or maybe even before that - but that doesn’t mean she can’t win the war.

She’s going to talk to Hill, the first chance she gets. And then the two of them are going to explain - very calmly and rationally, of course, because the last thing they need is accusations of being hysterical - to Coulson and Fury just why any attempt to recruit the deadliest, most infamous spy associated with the Soviet Union to an organisation that claims to be proudly American is going to fail. Miserably. And possibly bloodily, though she’ll do anything she can to prevent that particular outcome.

* * *

“Sharon,” Hill says, and the gentleness in her voice makes Sharon - paradoxically, she’s aware - want to move further away. “You know you don’t have a say in this.”

“She’s _tricking_ us,” Sharon repeats, knowing that her tone has a shade of petulance in it that she hates but doesn’t know how to get rid of. She’s had to work hard enough to make the agents she works with see her as something other than the little girl who ran around after her aunt playing pretend; she could do without her own voice making her sound like a child again.

Hill sighs. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that turns out to be true. But this decision was made by agents much more senior than you, in full consultation with both directors.”

That stings. And Sharon hadn’t missed the slight emphasis Hill had placed on the word _both._

“My aunt knows about Romanov?”

“She does.”

Oh. That - that makes things rather different. Sharon can’t think of a way to keep arguing - not gracefully, at least - if Peggy’s signed off on this decision as well. And she’s very aware that she’s probably only been given a tenth of the full picture in this situation, if that. Damn.

“You’re a good agent, Carter,” Hill says, and Sharon’s experienced enough at conversations like this to know when she’s being dismissed. “And that has nothing to do with your family. But you’ve got a few things to learn still.”

There are times when you have to - gracefully, of course - admit defeat. 

Sharon swallows. “Okay,” she says, because she can admit that’s probably more than true. She hasn’t been an official part of SHIELD all that long, after all, and she realises now that she was stepping out of line when she questioned Coulson. “Um. Can you - what’s the most important thing I have to work on, would you say?”

She might as well use this opportunity to take on board a lesson or two. And Hill is one of the few senior agents who have never done anything to lose Sharon’s respect; if she has any advice, it’s going to be worth following.

Hill looks at her for a few long seconds, while Sharon tries hard to appear calm and as mature as she possibly can.

“Knowing when to break the rules,” Hill says finally, with a smile that’s over almost before it begins.

* * *

Sharon would have gone to see Peggy today anyway, but she hurries just a little more than usual as she walks the short distance between the bus stop and the hospital.

The doctors still aren’t quite sure what’s wrong with her great-aunt, even though she’s been receiving the best medical care on the planet - quite literally. No expense has been spared, and nor will it be. The world will be a worse place when Peggy Carter leaves it. Sharon knows that there have been murmurs of things she can’t bear to think about - words like _dementia,_ or _brain tumour_ \- but that’s a bridge she’ll face down when it’s right in front of her.

It doesn’t seem possible, that someone as brilliant and intelligent as the woman she’s admired for her whole life could be betrayed by her own brain. Sharon knows it would be a tragedy if it happened to anyone, of course she knows that, but - Peggy? That would be beyond unbearable.

That bridge can still be ignored for a while longer though, thankfully.

The nurses and security staff all know Sharon, of course, but they still make her go through the usual protocols before letting her into Peggy’s room. Which is just as it should be; she’d have been more than a little angry if they hadn’t. Her aunt’s safety should never be taken lightly.

“Hi,” she says quietly, making her way over to the window where Peggy’s sitting.

Peggy turns round, not looking surprised at all. “Sharon, darling. It’s lovely to see you.”

“You too,” Sharon says, trying very hard not to think about the possibility that one day she might look into her aunt’s eyes and see no hint of recognition there.

That won’t happen. It can’t. This is Peggy Carter, for fuck’s sake. 

They share news for a while. Peggy is always eager for any updates on how things are going at SHIELD. It makes Sharon's stomach hurt when she thinks too much about how _wrong_ it is, her being the one sharing information about the organisation her aunt had built and led for decades.

“Fury's doing a good job,” Sharon says, knowing that Peggy will be glad to hear that rather than envious. Well, maybe a bit of both. But Sharon would be in for a long rant if she sugarcoated any details. “Most of the junior agents are terrified of him, though,” she adds, in the spirit of full disclosure.

“But not you?” Peggy asks, sounding amused. She's always been good at reading between the lines of conversations, picking up the things people want her to hear but don't want to say, or sometimes the things that they never wanted to be heard at all.

It’s sad, in a way, how necessary that skill has been for her over the years.

“It’s kind of hard to be scared of someone who babysat for me once,” Sharon says dryly. 

Peggy only gives a confused little frown in response, and Sharon’s heart starts beating wildly - that could just be regular forgetting, couldn’t it? It had been a long time ago. 

Then Peggy’s expression clears and the light of recognition hits her eyes, and Sharon abruptly feels like she can breathe again.

“Oh, I remember,” Peggy says, laughing a little. “You were staying with me for a few nights - were Harrison and Mandy on holiday, or something?”

“Yeah. They wanted a childfree week in the Hamptons, which I can understand.”

Sharon’s parents love her, she doesn’t doubt that. But she had never been quite as close to them as a child as she feels like a loved child should have been, and she knows that while they care about her and want her to be happy, they don’t really understand her.

That honour has always been reserved for just one of her family members.

“And I got called in to work,” Peggy says, looking sort of distant, as though she’s replaying the day in her mind. “Something about Cuba. Oh, the Soviet Union really fucked them over in the nineties, didn’t it?” Sharon stays silent, not wanting to interrupt with any questions. Inwardly she’s smiling; she always finds it amusing when Peggy swears, with her still-crisp Queen’s English and her pristine outfit. “And I didn’t have a babysitter on call! I think that was the first time your parents trusted me to look after you on your own, wasn’t it?”

Sharon honestly has no idea. “I don’t remember. I was only little, but I think so.”

Peggy nods. “And there was me, screwing it up because of a minor international incident.” She looks at Sharon. “You’re more important than politics, darling, of course you are. Just - they needed me, and I - well. I suppose I don’t sound like a very good great-aunt.”

“You’re the _best,”_ Sharon says fiercely. “And of course you had to leave. I maybe didn’t understand when I was six, but I do now.” It’s true. She doesn’t resent Peggy when it comes to any of the cancelled birthday appearances or last-minute rearrangements. That's just how it had to be; and there's more than a few reasons Peggy never had any children of her own.

“You’re very kind to an old woman,” Peggy says, the mischievous little shine in her eyes telling Sharon that she’s feeling far from old, even though she practically lives in a hospital now. A fancy hospital, sure - her room looks like it’s come straight out of the Four Seasons - but still. 

“Why was it Fury you called?” Sharon asks, curious to hear Peggy's answer now that the thought's occurred to her.

“Well, it had to be someone I could trust. And Nick was still a very junior agent then - much like yourself, I suppose - but he was trustworthy. I could see that. There were so many other things I couldn’t see, but at least I got that one right.”

Peggy looks tired, now, and Sharon regrets the reason she’d come here. She doesn’t need to ask about the Black Widow; she was being selfish, she realises that now. She has no right to question her aunt on her decisions. No right to step in on something much more senior than her rank should permit. She had insisted on no special treatment; if _she's_ the one to break that rule it would be the worst kind of hypocrisy.

“Well, he was a great babysitter,” she says, trying to keep the mood light. “I think we drew a lot of ballerina cats, if I remember right.” Which is the weirdest memory, actually, now that Fury’s her boss’s boss. She hopes she can manage to ignore the recollection the next time Fury's the one giving her an assignment.

He’d been a good choice to replace Peggy though; Sharon does believe that, even if the thought of anyone truly _replacing_ her aunt is an impossible one. She thinks that Fury might be of a similar opinion, which is one of the reasons she approves of him - not that her approval is necessary, of course, except to her - as the new Director.

“I shall remind him, next time he visits me,” Peggy says, and Sharon smiles when she sees that the light in her eyes is back. “Now, what on earth is wrong with you?”

Sharon sits upright. “What? Nothing. Why would you say that?”

That was too defensive, she realises a second later, wincing as Peggy’s gaze seems to pierce right into her mind.

“I have two guesses,” Peggy says, perfectly calmly. “Either that Brock kid is flirting with you again -”

Sharon shakes her head immediately. “No, no. I dealt with Rumlow. He’s been very thoroughly informed of the SHIELD policies on harassment.” Sharon had also trounced him in the firing range, which she personally thinks left much more of a lasting impression than the paperwork did.

Peggy smiles; it isn’t all happy, but Sharon will take it. “Excellent,” she says. “My second guess, then? You’re worried about Natalia.”

It takes a moment to click for Sharon - _Natalia - Natasha Romanov - Black Widow_ \- but when it does she has to close her eyes for a moment. Is she really that transparent? 

Maybe Peggy just knows her that well, she thinks after a few quiet seconds.

“I am,” she says firmly, knowing that it won’t change anything. “She’s the _Widow_ \- I can’t believe this is even being considered.”

Peggy sighs. “She is the Widow. But she’s also a scared young woman who has known nothing but death and manipulation for all the life she can remember, as far as we know. Don’t you think everyone deserves a chance, Sharon?”

Sharon notices that Peggy hadn’t said a _second_ chance. She knows that the wording had been deliberate. 

She thinks about it, in a way that she recognises she should have done before. 

What if it was her? Raised in - essentially - a cult, trained for god-knows-what from childhood. Wouldn’t she want the first chance for a better life that came along?

“I guess,” she says, truthfully if reluctantly. “But I’m going to be watching her.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything else,” Peggy says, reaching out and laying her hand over Sharon’s. “Not from the girl who asked for a thigh holster for her ninth birthday.”

* * *

It takes Barton over a month - and a very nasty gut wound from one of his own arrows - before he calls in his location with a pick-up request. For two people.

Sharon doesn’t say anything when she hears the news. She’s determined not to back down on this. She _knows_ she’s right, but she also knows that she has little to no power here.

Powerless doesn’t have to mean helpless, though, which is a fact that’s only been growing more and more true over the last century, as superheroes refuse to stop appearing in the world.

She’s going to keep a very discreet eye on the Black Widow.

Or that’s her plan, at least, until it gets derailed by the first face-to-face encounter she has with SHIELD’s newest turncoat.

* * *

Sharon never forgets meeting the legendary Black Widow, and part of the reason for that - though far from all, she'll realise years later - is how _weird_ it turns out to be.

She’s sitting in one of the SHIELD breakrooms, trying to focus on her latest report without getting powdered sugar all over it, when someone reaches over the back of her sofa and grabs a doughnut from her bag.

“I will end you,” Sharon begins, assuming that it’s one of her fellow agents, before turning around to see -

Oh.

Well, technically it _is_ one of her fellow agents. But it will be a long time before Sharon counts this particular one as a trusted coworker.

“That would be difficult for you,” the Black Widow says. It’s almost incomprehensible, both because of her thick accent and because she has half a doughnut stuffed in her mouth.

Sharon just blinks. She knows that she shouldn’t be caught this off-guard; her reaction doesn’t bode well for a career as a secret agent, for one thing. But - how is she supposed to respond to this?

“I didn’t think you were out of questioning for another week,” she goes with. _And I didn’t think you’d be up and walking around the building on your own, even when you’d given them everything you know,_ she thinks but doesn’t say.

The Widow - okay, Sharon should probably stop thinking of her like that, if they’re supposed to work together at some point. _Romanov_ grins at her. It doesn’t make Sharon feel even the slightest bit at ease. She wonders if it was supposed to, or if it was intended to have the opposite effect.

“They know all they need to know for now,” Romanov says, which is quite possibly the most ominous statement Sharon’s ever heard. “And they gave me an ankle bracelet.” She lifts her leg up - much higher than anyone other than a ballet dancer or a gymnast should be able to - and Sharon sees the black band. “It is quite good,” Romanov continues, looking thoughtful. “It would take me a whole two minutes to remove. Most take eight seconds.”

“I -”

Sharon falls silent. What the hell is she supposed to do with that information? Coulson, Hill, Fury - even Peggy. They’re all behind this decision, which must mean that they know Romanov could escape at any time she chose to, and that they’re gambling on the hope that she doesn’t want to.

Literally everything about this is beyond risky. But Sharon doesn’t have any options here, or at least not any good ones. Damn.

“How are you liking SHIELD so far?” she asks, deciding to ignore the ankle bracelet thing. She’ll mention it to Coulson, of course, but she’d bet that he’s already aware. One day one of that man's risks is going to backfire, and Sharon won't be glad when it does. Things going wrong at SHIELD tends to lead to serious injury at best.

“It is slow,” Romanov says - what does that even mean? “But the food is very nice.”

Sharon stares at her. Not because of what she’d said about the food - which is pretty accurate, actually; SHIELD's budget for catering must be ridiculously high - but because she’d said it in a flawless American accent.

Which means - okay, it _could_ mean that Romanov is some kind of homesick for her country, maybe, and had been speaking with her Russian accent so that she could keep that part of her identity close. That's a perfectly reasonable explanation. But somehow Sharon doesn’t think that it's the truth.

“You’re doing the accent to fuck with everyone,” Sharon says blankly. What the _hell?_

“It is very boring here so far,” Romanov says with a shrug. “And you people are still afraid of us.”

By _us,_ Sharon guesses she means the Russians. And Sharon would love to refute that, she really would, but - well. She knows that most of the older SHIELD agents had spent literal decades living in fear and paranoia about what exactly the Cold War was going to do to their country - and to the world - and she also knows that more than a few of them might use that as an excuse to be prejudiced against any Russian agent.

And when that agent has also been responsible for a number of killings that caused SHIELD more than a handful of problems, especially when some of the deaths were on American soil - yeah, Sharon can’t deny that Romanov is going to have a hard time making friends here.

For just a moment, she feels a faint sensation of pity rise up inside her. It must have been a lonely life, Romanov’s, and the knowledge that her new allegiance - Sharon hopes yet again that it really _is_ her new one - most likely won’t do much to heal that loneliness - well, it’s sad, is all.

But that isn’t Sharon’s job to fix. Maybe one day, when Romanov’s proved herself, maybe then they can be something a little closer to friendly, if not friends.

Not now, though.

And her break is almost over, in any case. She stands, gathering together the papers that she’s now going to have to check over after she clocks out. Annoying. “Ah - it was nice to meet you,” she says, knowing that she isn’t managing to make it sound sincere. “Maybe we’ll be working together sometime.”

Romanov jumps lightly onto the back of the sofa, carefully removes a ceiling tile, and climbs into the _fucking air vent._ “I doubt it,” she says, still in her American accent. She twists herself round so that her head and shoulders are dangling out of the vent. “I work better alone. Or with Barton, maybe, once he gets over our little altercation.”

“You mean the altercation where you stabbed him with his own _arrow?”_ Sharon says, still looking up in complete disbelief. “I - what are you _doing?_ You can’t be up there. It’s a breach of every security protocol in the building.” That's an understatement, quite frankly, and the only reason she isn't calling for back-up is - actually, why isn't she?

Romanov does some kind of complicated upside-down shrug. “It’s okay. I’m just going to Coulson’s office. He won’t mind.”

“He fucking will mind,” Sharon begins, before she realises that actually it’s entirely possible Coulson will just treat the whole incident as a mildly amusing anecdote - _oh, remember the time the most deadly assassin in the world climbed out of the ceiling onto my desk?_ She swallows. “I’m recommending that they put bars in the middle of every vent in the building, just so you know,” she says firmly. She isn’t going to back down on this.

“Good idea,” Romanov says, before pulling herself up. “It’s a terrible security flaw, really.”

And with that she’s gone, leaving Sharon to climb onto the sofa - a thousand times more awkwardly than Romanov, she's fully aware, swearing loudly as she nearly overbalances twice - and nudge the ceiling tile back into place.

She sinks down onto the sofa again, not caring that she’ll be late to training. She needs a few minutes to process everything that just happened. Maybe a few hours.

She had imagined meeting a silent, sullen woman, one who could turn any everyday object into a murder weapon, one who was doing everything in her power to manipulate all the agents in the building.

Or a fierce rebel, spitting words no-one understood at anyone trying to help her, not caring about allegiances or camaraderie or teamwork in the slightest.

There were a lot of things she’d imagined.

But even more that she hadn’t, she’s realising now.

She definitely hadn’t imagined a doughnut-stealing prankster who would exaggerate her own accent to make fun of people, or who would let Sharon know about a serious security issue in the most weird, roundabout - and irritating - way imaginable.

Time to go beat up some of her fellow agents; maybe that will make her feel better. Hopefully Romanov won’t be watching from above. God, Sharon’s going to be even more paranoid than usual, after this.

But - none of her worst fears had come true. Not yet, at least.

Sharon sighs. She has a lot of thinking to do.

* * *

2014:

Sharon sinks down onto a bench in a park outside a very nondescript building in DC. It’s deliberately not eye-catching, of course; you don’t want the headquarters of the CIA’s most covert operations to have a blazing sign on the side. The park itself is boring as well; a few walkways, sparse hedges here and there - nothing anyone could use for decent camouflage, of course - and then the occasional bench scattered around. No swings or skateboard ramps. The usual visitors here don't want to encourage kids to use it as a hang-out.

Most of the other people in the park are agents on their lunch break, just like her. It’s laughable how easily they stand out, really, once you know what to look for. It’s nothing to do with their general appearance, or the way they dress; if she was only looking at those things then she might assume they were all lawyers, or part of one of the giant corporations that seem to be taking over the parts of the city not occupied by politics.

No, it’s the way they hold themselves. The way they can’t help but scan their environment every few seconds, checking to make sure a threat hasn’t appeared on the horizon, knowing how unlikely that is but unable to stop themselves from looking anyway.

She guesses that she’s probably no different, although at SHIELD she’d been trained to blend in whenever possible. Steve had certainly never suspected that Kate, the friendly nurse-next-door, was anything other than who she claimed to be. Though maybe Steve isn’t the best gauge of her abilities; she still doesn’t know him that well, but she’s picked up enough to realise that he isn’t exactly an expert on subterfuge.

Or on subtlety in anything, really, she thinks, smiling to herself as she remembers a few of the more interesting stories Peggy had told her about Steve and his Howling Commando days.

She grabs the blueberry muffin she’d brought with her out of its bag and takes a bite, ignoring her sandwich. She’s never been able to get out of the habit of eating her dessert first, even though she knows she’ll regret it in ten minutes. Maybe she should start bringing two desserts? That might -

“I found my parents,” comes a voice from beside Sharon, and she only stops herself from reaching towards her holster with a great deal of effort.

What the _hell._

It’s Romanov. Of course it is. Sharon prides herself on knowing that very few people can sneak up on her without her noticing them. But she’s also a realist, and she’s aware that she’ll most likely never be able to get certain people off that list.

Romanov is at the top.

She turns her head. “I didn’t know you’d been looking for them,” she says, because she isn’t going to make any kind of blanket statement like _that’s good,_ not until she has at least a bit more information.

“Been a while since I ran into you,” is Romanov’s response, which is nothing like an actual answer to Sharon’s implied question.

“I’m with the CIA now,” Sharon points out. “Not exactly your area.” Not that she knows what Romanov’s area is anymore, not really. She isn’t sure she ever did. Destroying SHIELD, she guesses, and she hates herself for the fucked-up mix of gratitude and guilt and resentment that starts building up inside her whenever she thinks about that for too long, so she pushes it firmly to the back of her mind.

All those years of covert ops training have to be good for something, right? Even if that something happens to be repressing inconvenient emotions.

“I know,” Romanov says, and - of course she does. Sharon would have kept tabs on her as well, if it had been possible. “I wanted to check in.”

 _So you decided to sneak up on me while I was eating lunch in a nice, peaceful park?_ Sharon thinks but doesn’t say.

She sighs. “It’s good to see you,” she says, and it isn’t even a lie. Her anger at the reveal of SHIELD’s corruption had never been directed at the people responsible for revealing it, not even for a moment. Don’t shoot the messenger, and all that. 

So, yeah, she isn’t angry at Romanov. In awe of her, is more like it. The courage it must have taken to release those files to the public - well, Sharon doesn’t know for sure if she could have made the same call in that position. She admires Romanov, has done for longer than she cares to admit to herself.

But still. The two of them had never been particularly close, not even when they’d both been SHIELD agents. The types of missions they’d been assigned to were usually very different, and while Sharon used to get updates on Romanov from Maria and Coulson, she’d preferred to keep tabs on their most dangerous agent from a distance. After their more-than-odd first encounter, at any rate.

“Do you want to come with me?” Romanov says, and Sharon looks at her again, startled out of her thoughts.

“What? Where?”

“To see them,” is the reply, and Sharon has to take a moment to think back to the way their conversation had started. She resents being caught off guard like this. All she’d wanted was a peaceful half-an-hour to eat her lunch.

“To see your _parents?”_

Why would Romanov be asking her, of all people? Sure, they’ve got along okay for a while now, but that’s a far cry from the kind of relationship Sharon would have thought that request calls for.

“Steve said I should get in touch with you,” she says, instead of answering the question, and Sharon frowns. She has no idea where Steve is right now, which isn’t a minor concern. She wants to make sure that he stays updated on Peggy’s condition, apart from anything else.

She knows that Romanov and Steve are close, even if she doesn’t fully understand their friendship. “So you know where he is?” she asks, not sure what she wants the answer to be.

“South Korea. With Wilson. They think they have a lead.”

Romanov’s tone seems to be saying _they’re wrong, but what can you do?_ Sharon decides not to ask for any more details. If Romanov is in touch with Steve, that’s going to have to be good enough.

Sharon still feels just the smallest twinge of guilt when she thinks about how she’d let Steve get to know her alias - though really, Kate had been mostly her, just with a few necessary tweaks. And she’d only been doing her job. 

“I’m sorry,” Romanov says abruptly, and Sharon has a feeling that whatever’s coming next is the real reason her lunch had been interrupted.

“For?” She knows what for, of course. It’s maybe a little cruel to make Romanov clarify, but it’s too late to take her question back.

“Exposing SHIELD.” 

Sharon doesn’t answer for a moment. Not because she wants to prolong the tension, or anything, just because she isn’t sure of either what she wants to say or how she wants to say it.

“It needed to be done.” That doesn’t seem like enough, though it's nothing but the truth. “I’m glad you did it.” There. Those words hadn’t been easy to say; SHIELD has been a part of Sharon’s life almost from her birth, in a way few people can lay claim to. But there’s truth in them, nonetheless.

She’d grown up bursting with pride at everything her aunt Peggy had managed to accomplish with her life, and even the knowledge that so much of it had turned out to be twisted into something unthinkable doesn’t undo the fact that Peggy and her team had still done a lot of good for the world. Still protected it, to their best of their abilities.

There had been little doubt that Sharon would want to follow in her footsteps. Peggy never pushed her in that direction - almost the opposite, actually, in some respects; Sharon guesses that the life of an agent hadn’t been one Peggy would have chosen for her, though she’d always respected Sharon’s decision.

And been proud of her. That means more to Sharon than she knows how to put into words.

“Peggy understands as well,” Sharon says, since Romanov has had more than enough time to reply, and is clearly happy to sit in semi-awkward silence. 

“I know. I went to see her.”

What?

“When?”

Romanov smiles. It isn’t a particularly happy smile, but nor is it sad. “A few weeks ago. I wanted to - well. I needed to speak to her.”

“And she understood what you were saying?” Sharon asks, unable to keep the urgency out of her voice.

Romanov tilts her hand back and forth. “Mostly. Enough to say she was glad the truth was out there, at least. After that she told me some war stories.” She smiles again. “I have blackmail material on Steve for life now.”

There are so many things Sharon wants to say that they’re all getting tangled up inside her head.

“Why do you want me to come with you?” she asks again, because that seems like the most pressing concern.

“I like you,” Romanov says easily. “And I don’t want to go alone, and Steve suggested I ask you. Barton is - busy. You can say no.”

“I know I can say no,” Sharon says, rolling her eyes. “I’ve got over thinking that you’re about to doublecross us any second.”

“That’s one of the reasons I always liked you." Sharon blinks, taken off guard yet again. "You were suspicious of me much longer than most of the other agents were.”

“And that made you _like_ me?” That makes no sense.

Romanov shrugs one shoulder. “I like sensible people.”

Right. 

Sharon seriously considers whether or not she’s seriously considering accompanying Romanov to - presumably - Russia, to meet her long-lost parents who may or may not be expecting her.

“How will you even prove who you are?” she asks. “It’s been a long time.”

An expression crosses Romanov’s face that Sharon doesn’t have a name for. “It has,” she says, solemnly. “Too long. When I say I found them - I found their grave.”

Oh.

“I’m sorry,” Sharon says, knowing that there’s no way she’s going to refuse now.

The only reply she gets to that is in Russian, which Sharon still hasn’t learnt.

“When do you want to leave?” she remembers to ask, even though she hasn’t even officially said yes yet.

Romanov stands up. “How about in three days?”

* * *

Natasha - Sharon’s been finding it hard to think of her as Romanov, after their strange conversation in the park - sends the flight details to Sharon’s work email, the CIA one that no-one external should have any way of accessing.

Sharon doesn’t bother to feel surprised when she sees the message. She prints out the information and then deletes it. Not that deleting it would stop anyone who was really looking for anything suspicious - she hopes not, anyway, considering where she works - but at least she doesn’t have to constantly be reminded of it every time she opens her email now.

It’s a commercial flight, and she wonders how Natasha is planning on getting around the fact that almost every one of her aliases is currently banned from leaving the country.

By using one of SHIELD’s appearance-altering masks and a scarily realistic fake passport, it turns out once they arrive at the airport. 

“How much tech did you steal from SHIELD?” Sharon asks quietly, after they’ve made it through security with no issues. She’s more curious than anything; there’s a few toys she’d have liked to get her hands on herself. She wishes she knew more about what had happened to all the gadgets SHIELD had designed in the wake of the - well, of the collapse of the entire organisation; there isn’t really a nice way to put it.

Being Peggy Carter’s niece should count for something, she knows, but she’s got this far without once using that as leverage - deliberately, at least; she can’t change any preconceptions in people’s minds - and she’s going to try to keep it that way.

“Oh, you know,” Natasha says vaguely. “Just a few odds-and-ends.”

“Right,” Sharon says in the driest voice she can manage. “Enough to take down a small country, or just a city?”

Natasha gives her a sideways little smile, and doesn’t answer.

Sharon tries very hard to focus on why she’d agreed to this trip in the first place.

Except that’s easier thought than done, because she honestly isn’t sure. Partly it’s that she wouldn’t want anyone to be alone when finding their parents’ graves for the first time. And partly it’s that she does like Natasha now, mostly, or at least she wants to figure her out - if such a thing is even possible.

Mostly, though, she wonders if maybe she just needed a little bit of adventure back in her life.

She actually manages to sleep on the plane, which is more than welcome. She hadn’t slept well at all for the past few nights; visions of leaving the country only to get the call from someone at the hospital that this was it, she had to be there _right now_ to say goodbye to her aunt forever, had refused to stop dancing through her mind, and she’d resorted to crashing on the couch in front of a too-loud TV in a futile attempt to drown out her own thoughts.

Natasha is quietly looking out of the window every time Sharon blinks her eyes open. It’s an overnight flight, so there really isn’t anything to be watching out there other than darkness. She considers asking Natasha if she wants to talk about her parents, once, but then thinks better of it and lets her mind drift back into the welcoming haze of sleep.

As they’re standing in the line to pass through Customs, Sharon feels a spike of panic rise up inside her at the thought that the agents might assume her and Natasha are a couple. She can’t quite remember the current laws on same-gender relationship in Russia, but she knows enough to guess that they probably aren’t exactly accepting. 

Her moment of panic doesn’t just stem from the possibility of them being arrested, though. It’s also - well, Sharon isn’t _ashamed_ of being bisexual; she got over that a long time ago. But she doesn’t exactly shout it from the rooftops, either. She’s out to her family, but she’s never come out at any of her workplaces. If Natasha knows, it can only be from observation. And that thought makes her uncomfortable in a way she can’t quite figure out but wants to. Maybe she doesn’t like the idea of being identified, especially not by things she isn’t aware of. Or it could just be that she doesn’t want Natasha to know.

They get through with no difficulty at all, in the end, thanks mostly to Natasha’s Russian. Sharon doesn’t even bother to ask what their cover story is. This isn’t a mission, it’s a - she isn’t quite sure what it is, actually. But it isn’t a mission.

The air feels like it’s biting through Sharon’s clothes as soon as she steps out of the airport into the Moscow winter. “Is it ridiculous to say that I didn’t expect it to be quite this cold?” she says under her breath, wincing as a grey cloud of condensation forms in the air along with her words.

Natasha gives her a look, and something in Sharon’s stomach feels like it turns over, which she ignores. “It is Russia,” Natasha points out, her accent sounding just a little less American than it usually does these days.

“Yeah, yeah.” Seriously, though. It gets cold on the east coast, of course it does, but somehow everything feels that much sharper here. Sharon can’t help but stay on edge, in this new city - new _country,_ she’s never had any reason to travel to Russia before - and she pulls her coat even tighter around herself, burying her hands deep into the pockets and refusing to give into the urge to tuck her face down into the collar.

She isn’t about to let her guard down, not even when she’s travelling with possibly the most difficult person in the world to take by surprise.

“Do you want to find a hotel and sleep for a bit?” Sharon asks, even though she can already tell what the answer will be. Natasha is looking around at landmarks, and occasionally glancing down at a map on her phone, probably tracking the fastest and most people-free route to the cemetery.

“We can do,” Natasha says, still looking everywhere except at Sharon.

Sharon isn’t sure if she’s getting better at reading Natasha, or if Natasha is feeling comfortable enough around her to let a few of her guards drop, or if it’s some kind of mix of the two.

Or something else entirely, maybe. She isn’t going to rule anything out. 

Okay. She sighs to herself, very quietly. “Or we could go straight there,” she says, knowing she made the right choice as soon as Natasha glances up at her.

“It’s about a fifty-minute walk,” Natasha says. 

Sharon looks around at the snow. The streets are icy, but if they’re careful they won’t slip. And it isn’t literally snowing right this second, or anything. It could be worse. Things could always be worse, really. “Then let’s make a start,” she says. She kind of wants to take a few steps to make her point - at least when they’re moving, it won’t be quite so freezing - but since she has no idea which direction they’re supposed to be heading in it would be a pretty useless thing to do.

Natasha looks at her carefully for a few seconds. Sharon has no idea what her own face is doing right now, other than shivering, and she doesn’t bother to control whatever expression she has on.

“It’s this way,” Natasha says, quietly confident as always, even though the street she’s pointing at looks more than a little creepy in the early morning light. Sharon follows anyway, of course.

They walk in silence. It doesn’t take fifty minutes; maybe more like half an hour. Time doesn’t seem to have much meaning like this, trudging through the snow, putting one foot in front of the other, passing only a handful of people - all with their heads down, all headed in the opposite direction.

Sharon waits at the gate of the graveyard as Natasha enters. The air feels haunted, even at the entrance, weighted down by a heavy stillness that she knows isn’t supernatural but which makes her shiver with something more than cold anyway.

She still isn’t sure why she’s here. Moral support? Though if that was the case, she should be walking forward now, shouldn’t she? Scanning the rows the way Natasha is, looking for a Romanov - except Sharon frowns at that thought, because she has no idea if Romanov is Natasha’s original surname. She doubts it is, now that she’s thinking about it. How did Natasha even track her parents down, anyway?

Each grave casts a shadow. They fall across the winter snow in rows of soft grey. Like the tombs of ghosts. Sharon digs her hands deeper into her pockets. She thinks of Peggy, and then wishes she’d thought of anything else in the world.

Had Natasha even known her birth name, before this quest? When did she start being called Natasha, or Natalia? Was it the name her parents had given her? Or had the Red Room selected it at random, assigned it to her, until she claimed it as her own despite all their tortures?

Or maybe Natasha had chosen it for herself, had defied the people who tried to twist and mould her for years by giving herself a new identity, one that she - and only she - could craft for herself.

Sharon wonders why she never thought to ask any of this. It would never have occurred to her back when Natasha was first brought into SHIELD, she isn’t going to kid herself about that. She prides herself on being - mostly - self-aware, and her younger self had been victim to more than a few blindspots and shoulder-chips that have been shaken off over the intervening years.

But since then?

She still hadn’t thought much about it, and she feels a distant sort of shame at that realisation. At first, she’d taken for granted that the Black Widow was a kind of construction of masks, one that you could keep stripping down, layer by layer, never getting to any real kind of core. 

What a terrible thing to believe about a person, Sharon thinks, and her guilt deepens.

That was the thing, wasn’t it? She hadn’t seen Natasha as a _person_ for a long, long time. Not even when Steve had told her about pranks she would play on him, or when she’d heard stories about the Widow and Hawkeye convincing the entirety of SHIELD that they’d been body-swapped by alien magic for a day.

Sharon swallows, not wanting to face up to the truth. Facing up to it anyway, because that’s what Carter women do, and Sharon has never been one to flinch away from truths, no matter how harsh, no matter how exposing they might be.

So. The truth. The truth is -

She isn’t sure she saw Natasha as a real person until right now, here in a graveyard on the other side of the world.

Natasha is dressed all in black, Sharon notices all over again. In mourning, maybe. Or it could just be that black clothes are practical; Sharon isn’t going to try to guess. It’s none of her business, anyway. 

The only colour to be seen is the vivid red of her hair. Like fire, Sharon thinks. A single flame, surrounded by ice.

She moves forward.

Before she’s taken three steps, Natasha turns, and Sharon halts again. She doesn’t know how Natasha had sensed the movement, but it doesn’t surprise her that she did.

But then Natasha reaches out a hand, and Sharon goes to meet her.

They hold hands, fingers linked a little awkwardly though their gloves, and it doesn’t feel strange, or romantic, or even particularly new, even though it _is;_ Sharon would definitely remember holding hands with the Black Widow.

With Natasha.

They don’t talk. They move in silence, and Sharon realises that Natasha already knows exactly where she’s going. Maybe she’d only been reading the names of the graves out of interest, or to prolong the inevitable. Or to wait for Sharon to catch up.

They halt in front of a stone cross, with what Sharon thinks are two names engraved on the base. She can’t have her questions about Natasha’s surname answered by simple observation, because she’s picked up a few languages over the years but none of them ever involved Cyrillic script.

She doesn’t hold Natasha’s hand too tightly, just in case the touch isn’t welcome anymore. Natasha could pull away easily, with one small step forward.

She doesn’t.

“I should have brought - flowers,” Natasha says after a few long moments. 

Sharon carefully doesn’t point out how fast they would wither away in the cold. “We can go find some, if you want,” she says softly. Somewhere in the city must sell fresh flowers, even in a bitterly cold winter.

Natasha sighs, and tightens her grip on Sharon’s hand. “No.” She looks at the cross, unblinking. “I don’t want to come back. I just wanted to see.”

“Alright,” Sharon says, no longer caring about the cold, or the walk back, or the fact that she’s just sat on a plane for several hours only to find out that she’s probably going to be doing the same thing all over again tomorrow. “We can stay as long as you want.”

But Natasha reaches out with her free hand, tugging the glove off with her teeth. Sharon feels a little flare of warmth at the thought that Natasha hadn’t wanted to lose their point of contact.

She places her hand on the cross, gently, and bows her head for only a moment.

Then she turns and walks away, leading Sharon behind her.

Sharon looks back, once, only to find that she can’t remember which cross it had been. They all look the same; stark silhouettes rising up from the ground, almost sinister against the quiet blankness of the snow.

Natasha doesn’t look back at all.

* * *

2016:

Natasha is the first person - the first friend - Sharon sees after she gets the call.

She’d known it was coming, of course. 

It isn’t a relief. Not exactly. But - Peggy was never one for lingering, was she? Sharon has been torn between the desire for her aunt to cling on to life for as long as possible, and the knowledge that Peggy would have preferred a swift end, for a long time now. 

And now the fight is over.

Is it a terrible thought, to feel like someone’s death is anti-climactic?

“I’m sorry,” Natasha says when she drops by. Sharon doesn’t bother to ask how she’d found out. Steve, probably. Or some other mysterious source; when they were both with SHIELD, Natasha had often known a lot of things she technically wasn’t supposed to. Sharon had given up being annoyed at that after a few months. Mostly.

Natasha looks - not nervous, exactly, but just a little unsure of herself. Which is such an unfamiliar expression on her face that Sharon can’t do anything but stare.

“Thanks,” she says after a few seconds, remembering that she should actually respond sometime.

Natasha holds out the travel mug she’d brought with her.

“I don’t really drink coffee,” Sharon admits. Everyone at SHIELD had been mildly surprised by that, and the CIA had been no different. They all seemed to think that no-one could make it through the kind of work they all did every day without having caffeine constantly running through their bloodstream.

“Good thing I didn’t make you coffee, then,” is all Natasha says, holding the cup so close to Sharon’s hands that she takes it without her brain even processing her limbs moving.

She can smell the hot chocolate, actually, now that she’s concentrating. She takes a cautious sip, not wanting to burn herself. Though she doesn’t know how it’s even still hot; there isn’t a coffee shop anywhere near her new apartment. 

It’s the perfect temperature, and it’s delicious. There’s some kind of caramel mixed with the chocolate, and there’s even a sprinkling of cinnamon on the top, which she always loves. She tries not to wonder too much about whether that had been a lucky guess, or whether Natasha took note of her hot chocolate preferences one time when Sharon hadn’t been paying attention.

“You bought this for me?” she asks, taking another sip and sighing a little as the caramel taste only deepens.

“No,” is all Natasha says. Sharon frowns, replaying the last few minutes in her head.

“You _made_ this for me?” she says, knowing that she sounds much too surprised. “How on earth is it still hot?” Natasha has an apartment in DC, but it’s nowhere near where Sharon lives. 

“Sam’s place is pretty close.”

Sharon raises an eyebrow. This isn’t exactly the conversation she thought she’d be having - neither of them have even mentioned Peggy, not directly - but somehow she doesn’t mind that right now. “I thought Sam was out of town,” she says. She _knows_ he is, actually, but she wants to hear the explanation.

Natasha just shrugs. 

_You broke into your friend’s house to make me hot chocolate?_ Sharon wants to ask.

“Thanks,” she says instead, hoping that her gratitude is coming across. 

“I’m good at killing people,” Natasha says matter-of-factly, and Sharon feels that odd little jolt in her chest, the one that always appears now whenever Natasha says something along those lines. She finds the dissociation when she remembers that Natasha and the Black Widow are one and the same still, in many ways - though far from all - all the more startling because of the fact that she had once thought she could never even be civil to her. “And making bad jokes,” Natasha continues, tilting her head in a way that makes it seem like she knows exactly what Sharon had been thinking about. “I’m not great at comforting people.”

Sharon wraps her hands around the mug, letting it warm her. “You’re doing alright,” she says, smiling at Natasha.

If anyone had asked her beforehand, she would have said that it could take days, or weeks, before she’d be smiling again after Peggy’s death.

Maybe she should feel guilty, or ashamed, that it’s barely been hours.

She doesn’t. Peggy wouldn’t want her to, for one thing, and - well, and she just doesn’t.

There’s enough things she can feel guilty about, these days. A little spark of happiness shouldn’t be one of them.

* * *

Sharon feels like she’s detached from everything happening around her for almost the entire funeral. The only time she feels alive is when she’s standing up front, speaking to the crowded church - and to many more people outside the walls, she knows that; a British radio company have been granted permission to record the ceremony for the public, though Sharon and the rest of her remaining family had drawn the line at it being filmed.

She isn’t really speaking to everyone listening, though she hopes that they think she is.

She looks at Steve as she hears her voice saying Peggy’s words, _even if the whole world is telling you to move,_ because while the number of people who admired and respected Peggy is too high to count, the people who truly loved her are part of a much smaller group.

It’s those people Sharon is speaking to, really, no matter what the nations listening might think. So she looks at Steve, and watches as he tries not to cry - _always so dramatic,_ Peggy might have said, _doesn’t he know we’re not in the forties anymore_ \- and she smiles at him, just a little, knowing that the versions of Peggy that they both knew and loved weren’t quite the same, never could be, but that they matched up in every way that was important.

As she descends the steps back to her seat, sparing a moment to hope that her heels don’t catch on anything, she glances at Natasha.

Who’s watching her right back, of course. She isn’t smiling, but she has a look on her face that makes Sharon feel inexplicably grateful to her anyway.

Sharon has never made friends easily. She wants to hold on to the ones she has, no matter what the circumstances are.

* * *

“Sam tells me you and Steve finally kissed,” Natasha says, and Sharon can’t read her expression at all.

It’s all over, finally. Except of course it isn’t. The disasters the Sokovia Accords caused - some visible to everyone, some that are only now starting to come to the surface, months later - will take a long, long time to fully heal.

In some cases, they never will. Sharon only knows Colonel Rhodes as a casual acquaintance - they tend to get invited to the same gatherings, and they’d occasionally bonded over being the least famous people in the room, at least before the whole War Machine thing had taken off with the media - but she likes him. She doesn’t exactly get frequent updates on how he’s doing, but she knows that Tony will be doing everything in his power to make sure Rhodes can walk again.

But now isn’t the right time to be thinking about the casualties of that particular battle.

She looks at Natasha, realising that she isn’t sure how to reply.

“Yeah,” she says slowly, thinking back to that brief kiss. It seems like it had happened years ago now, not months. “I mean - I think it was more of a thank you than anything else. Or a goodbye,” she adds as the thought occurs to her. She isn’t even sure where Steve is right now. “We care about each other, but we aren’t together. I don’t think we were ever going to be.”

She doesn’t feel guilty about that. Maybe she and Steve could have worked out, one day. In a few years, or in another lifetime. But she still isn’t sure if he’d really been interested in her or in the _idea_ of her, and that doesn’t seem like the best basis for a relationship.

“Oh,” Natasha says. Which could mean anything at all, really, Sharon thinks, feeling just a little rueful. Trust her to fall for a spy.

Wait. _Fall for?_ That - okay, that had just been a slip of her mind, or something. Natasha is more than attractive, in about a thousand different ways, sure, and Sharon never wants them to not be friends, which in itself in a thought she would never have had even last year, but - more than that?

The last few months have been just a little strained between them, even though they’ve remained in close contact, trying to wade through endless red tape barriers, commiserating with each other about how stubborn politicians can be - or just exchanging texts about inconsequential things; the different cities they’ve both lived in, or how to make yourself unrecognisable using only make-up from an everyday drugstore.

It’s odd, really, that she doesn’t feel like the tension between them is coming from the fact that they’d technically been on opposite sides, for a while. If you can call them _sides._

But it isn’t that, or at least she hopes not. There had been no perfect choices for either of them, not really, and she doesn’t regret the decisions she made - only that they had been necessary in the first place. Besides, everyone had ended up falling somewhere in the middle of the divide by the end, even Steve and Tony. 

Most likely Natasha had been in the grey area from the start, trying to keep everyone from making idiotic mistakes that could never be taken back. They don’t actually talk about it all that much, but that’s Sharon’s guess. Natasha is the least black-and-white person she’s ever met, even though ninety percent of her acquaintances are secret agents of some kind.

Sharon keeps getting the feeling that both of them are leaving a lot of things unsaid. And she knows that if this were about anything else, she’d be the one to break the not-quite-silence. But it _is_ about - 

Well.

It’s about them, and it’s about the _them_ that neither she nor Natasha are quite acknowledging. Sharon knows she isn’t imagining things, but some days she wonders if she’s making a little too much of them.

Then Natasha will smile at her in that way that she doesn’t smile at anyone else, or make her hot chocolate, or Sharon will text Natasha to warn her not to watch the latest Brooklyn 99 episode yet, because they’d started watching it together and Sharon would _know_ if Natasha had already been spoiled for all the jokes.

No, she isn’t imagining it. She just doesn’t know where they go from here. She almost feels like a teenager all over again, except dating had actually been simpler back then. Only guys, for a start, and none of them had ever come close to being any kind of long-term prospect.

She wonders what other people would say, if she was the sort of person who wasn’t terrible at asking for advice on her love life.

Maria would laugh for about an hour; she already teases Sharon about making friends with the one person she’d once claimed she would never, ever trust. Peggy would tell her to be brave, and not to wear shoes she can’t run in on a date. Steve would need a few minutes to take it in; he’d probably blush in that annoying way that doesn’t make him any less attractive, and then _he’d_ tell her to be brave, though in a softer, more teasing way than Peggy would have.

She’ll never get to ask Peggy, of course, and that thought makes her blink rapidly for a couple of seconds. She isn’t going to cry; it’s been a while now, long enough for her to get used to it - in some ways, at least - but she can’t help but miss her all over again for a moment.

Natasha doesn’t look like she’s about to say anything else, so it’s up to Sharon to keep the conversation going. She can’t think of anything to say, though, and she’s a little anxious about what exactly will come out if she just speaks whatever comes to mind.

She doesn’t know why she never mentioned the kiss to Natasha - well, she knows exactly why; she just doesn’t want to examine her reasons too closely.

But Natasha had been the one to bring it up, and Sharon doesn’t want to hope too much, but maybe that had been for a reason? You don’t bring up kisses that happened months ago if you don’t care about them, surely?

Maybe this will be her only opening, and if she doesn’t speak now she’ll never manage to get up the courage again.

Not that being Natasha’s friend isn’t its own kind of worthwhile; it is, it really is. But - Sharon knows that they could be something more, something that would be an _as well as_ to their friendship rather than an _instead of,_ and she doesn’t want to lose that chance for good.

“I think we should go to dinner,” Sharon says, not believing the words are coming out of her mouth even as she hears the after-echoes of them ringing in her ears, only a little drowned out by the suddenly overwhelming sound of her racing heartbeat.

Fuck.

Okay. It’s out there. She isn’t going to back down. And she isn’t going to claim she’d only meant it as a friendly kind of dinner, because she knows that Natasha would know that she was lying, and - and she really needs to stop overthinking this. 

She’ll get a straightforward reply, either a yes or a no, and she’ll accept either. That’s just the way it’s going to be.

“You don’t know me,” Natasha says, which is definitely not a simple answer, and Sharon wonders if the words were supposed to sound defiant. They hadn’t, not at all. Just - a little sad, maybe, is all.

And true. She can’t deny their truth. Oh, she knows a lot about Natasha now, after the past few years. Endless little shards of knowledge that she’s built up into a picture without realising it, until she knows that she’s one of the closest people in the world to Natasha, and also knows what an honour that is.

But knowing _about_ someone isn’t quite the same as knowing them, and she’s more than aware of that.

“I know I don’t,” she replies, keeping her voice soft. She takes a breath, watching as Natasha’s eyes flick down to her lips for half a second. “But I’d like to.”

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback and concrit are always very welcome. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
